Dream in Colour
by kiwi-fruit-from-hell
Summary: prompt: House discovers just how deeply Wilson's preoccupation with keeping up appearances goes. HouseWilson SLASH. Only a very small amount of angst.


Written for the House/Wilson fest on Livejournal using prompt: 55. House discovers just how deeply Wilson's preoccupation with keeping up appearances goes.

**Dream in colour**

House smiled inwardly when Wilson came into the exam room accompanied by his traditional furtive glances for patients and staff. In reality, both knew the only people who would even consider bursting into a room that House was listed as in occupation of was Cuddy, and today was nearly the start of the new financial year; she would be locked in her office attempting, often in vain, to rectify the dents that had been made in the budget over the past 12 months. Wilson's glances were purely because that was the way he had learnt to open doors that had House behind them.

His smile became visible as Wilson sauntered over and planted a sweet kiss on his lips.

"Hey, move over." Wilson shuffled onto the exam table.

"Hey, ask nicely or I'll push you off." He marvelled at the small tremors sprinting up his spine when Wilson's fingers grazed his. "What time do you get done tonight?"

"Maybe 6, probably more like 7. Sorry."

"I could wait," House pulled back from adding '_for you_', instead choosing, "Cuddy will be wearing my balls on a chain around her neck if I don't do something with my charting."

"You voluntarily do extra work, and then we both leave together? Way to make people suspicious, House."

House cocked his head. "Is that a problem?"

"Well…I just didn't realise we were, that we were telling people." He averted his eyes, looking up at House through lowered lashes.

"Why wouldn't we?"

"It's private."

"Wilson, half the hospital follows your life like it's a soap opera." He studied him. "Don't want to lose your rep as panty-peeler?"

Wilson pushed himself down off the table. "Can we talk about this later?"

"You have no intention of talking about this later." Narrowed eyes.

"I don't want you broadcasting the details of my sex life, ok?"

"'Sex life'?"

Wilson put his hands over his face, shaking his head and bending slightly at the waist. "House, don't do this, don't…"

"Perhaps if it was the details of your _relationships_ you didn't want broadcast, I'd be a bit more understanding."

After months of playing games with each other, or possibly years depending on how you looked at it, Wilson wasn't willing to let things go on in their weird code speak when neither really knew what was being said and heard. It was a defence mechanism, and had only served to make things more difficult. "Stop it! Stop pretending to be hurt so I feel guilty and you get your own way. Don't think I don't know what you're doing."

House smirked. "All's fair in love and war."

Wilson didn't want to venture a guess as to which applied here. He took a deep breath and forced himself to speak evenly, "I don't want people to know. I don't want people to speculate, I don't want them to interfere."

"People are idiots. What does it matter?"

"You might have created a separate universe for yourself, but I still have to live in the world with all the people." Wilson leant against the wall and ran his hand back through his hair, pushed to the edge of his nerves by House's flippant attitude.

House just paused and looked for a moment, not failing to admire the lines of Wilson's body. "I could tell them you are always the one giving."

He groaned. "I'm already making my life a hell of a lot harder by being with you, why do you want to make it worse!"

Hopping down from the table, House headed for the door, leaning heavily on his cane. He refused to let himself wince as he mistakenly put weight on his injured leg for balance. "I'm sorry; I certainly wouldn't want to be causing you any trouble. Congratulations for making it the whole week though, you should get a medal or something!"

Into the now empty room, Wilson whispered, "fuck."

Every canteen in the world has some basic similarities. The canteen at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital always gave Wilson the vague feeling of being back at McGill, in his first year of study. Truly away from his family and their attitudes, experiencing a world where he felt freer. He could never decide if this was because Canada really was more liberal than his family world in the suburbs, or if he never became part of a life or community that had any interest in passing judgement on him. Either way, the hospital reminded him of that. Every day he went to work and felt a slight tang of elation that he was working and coping in his own life. When he started eating lunch with House, if felt like he was living within his own morals. Quiet achievement was the feeling that linked these two places.

Quiet achievement and lights that shoot into your temples, fuzzing your head enough to make you a little less likely to notice the not-quite-right taste of the food.

Paying for his food a few hours after the first real "couple" argument with House, Wilson felt more like the hospital canteen was High School. He had been a gawky kid, too thin, too smart, and too nice. As a junior, he had fallen into a gang of giggly girls, though in all honesty they made his ears want to drop off. As a senior he had stayed gawky, too thin, too smart and too nice while all the other kids became jocks or intellectuals. He hadn't filled out to quarterback proportions like both of his older brothers had. His image went from just another "out of place teenager" to "doesn't like sports, doesn't have a girlfriend, eats salad at lunch and might as well be wearing a tank top standard gay boy". One in every school, apparently. The girls he hung with the previous year distanced themselves because fag hag wasn't a good look for aspiring prom queens. Reluctant to fall into the crowds that were expected of him and adamant the labels were wrong, he spent most of his senior year eating lunch alone.

When he turned around, a faint feeling of High School lingering on him and making him half expect he would trip over his own feet, Wilson realised he had been staring at House. He was eating what looked like the pasta bake – which looked like the pasta mom left in a pan overnight to eat as leftovers the next day, before she learnt it would have to be peeled from the metal, sprinkled with the bits of crusty cheese that formed when it wasn't properly wrapped. Wilson wondered why he wasn't eating a Reuben.

House met his eyes with a glare that had the clear message "I don't want to talk to you". Usually Wilson ignored it but he didn't feel like he had the energy for more games today. He glanced around for someone else he knew, someone he could sit with and make it look like they had business things to discuss. Debbie from accounting smiled at him and Laura from paediatrics waggled her fingers. Neither seemed like a good option. He looked to House again, who responded with another glare, a loud, hacking (and fake) cough, and raising his hand in a stop motion. Wilson dumped his tray on the empty table to his right and slid into the chair. If he needed to behave childishly, Wilson was done pandering to him.

It's not like High School had been so bad. And at least this grown-up version didn't include his family at the end of the day.

House had finished eating and risen from his seat, leaving his tray for the staff to deal with. Wilson had been watching him out of the corner of his eye. Instead of taking the easiest and most obvious route to the exit, he had pushed and edged between tables and chairs in order to pass Wilson. He stood looking down for a moment, staring at the contents of Wilson's plate.

"Hey," House mumbled.

"Hey."

"Good call. The pasta tasted like crap."

"Yeah, I didn't think it looked all that appetising."

"Yeah." House walked away without warning, leaving Wilson's "I'm sorry" hanging unheard in the air.

Wilson had ducked into House's office mid-afternoon, and found it empty. There were no symptoms listed on the whiteboard; everyone was on clinic duty. No doubt House was trying to be good to appease Cuddy.

Looking on the board, he saw House was assigned exam room four and a patient called Keating. Flicking quickly through the stack of charts, Wilson confirmed that Mr Keating was still in the waiting room and House was alone in exam room four. He glanced down the corridor for any signs of suspicious, approaching members of staff and slipped into the room.

"Hey."

"Hey." House didn't look up from his magazine.

Leaning back against the door, hands in pockets, Wilson sighed. Already, this wasn't going as planned. He was used to House being cold; he wasn't used to not having the option of walking away, at least, he didn't have that option if he wanted to fix things. "I'm sorry."

"What for?"

"Oh, come on, House." House only glanced up to raise an eyebrow, then returned to his reading. Wilson continued, "Fine. Sorry for saying something stupid earlier – that for the record I didn't mean – and sorry for not saying sorry sooner."

"'Kay."

"Yeah, that was convincing. You're still pissy."

"Sorry is a word. People lie with words. Actions tend to speak to me more."

The familiar sinking feeling struck Wilson. "What do you want me to do?"

"Kiss me. In clinic, in front of everyone."

"Don't be ridiculous." Wilson shook his head incredulously.

House closed his magazine and discarded it, casually dropping it to his side. He folded his arms. "Why is that so ridiculous?"

"Because…why do you want to make a spectacle of everything?"

Something in the tension broke, the air felt lighter. House had switched from annoying, defensive questions to annoying, analytical questions and things were back how they should be. Or as close to how they should be as they ever could get. Wilson closed the distance between them, leaning back onto the counter top opposite House's position on the exam table.

House just looked at him.

A thousand starts of sentences swam in Wilson's mind. "My parents-"

"Oh story time, fantastic."

"Can I talk please?"

"Oops. Go ahead."

"My parents, my family, just about everybody I knew thought I was gay when I was growing up – House, just don't say it. I know it's not a big deal, but I lived in a small town where there might as well have been witch hunts, and my brothers with shining examples of manhood. _Everyone knew_. Or at least, everyone thought they knew."

"So you forced yourself into a succession of terrible marriages to prove them wrong? Smart move."

"Don't start the gender-fuck thing, House. I'm straight, you just happen to be a manipulative bastard with great skills at confusing things. That wasn't my point."

"Your point was," House paused for a moment and softened his voice, "what people _think_ they know bothers you, so you'd rather they know nothing at all. And if what they think they know sometimes turns out to be at least partly true, you start to think their opinions have an effect on you. Your life isn't yours anymore."

"Exactly…except for all that crap that came after the first sentence."

House laughed. "Ok."

"Ok?"

"Yeah. We can keep things quiet to compensate for your screwed up childhood."

House walked out of the exam room feeling some of his good mood flooding back. In fact, he hadn't really wanted to walk out but recognised sex in the busy clinic in the middle of the afternoon, which was where things would have headed if he'd stayed, probably wasn't the best way to keep things quiet. He saw he had been assigned a patient about an hour ago and yanked the chart from the rack.

Turning to face the despondent occupants of the waiting room, House was startled by Wilson, who had somehow managed to sneak up close behind him, and whose lips were suddenly very close to his own. Soft and slow, eyes closed and resting his hand on the side of House's face, Wilson kissed him.

"Wait for me after work."


End file.
